Category Archives: Uncategorized
The Rise of Rizzo
To win re-election in 1967, Mayor James. H. J. Tate figured he needed to send a law and order message. So even before the primary polls closed in the Spring, Tate announced his choice for police commissioner: Frank L. Rizzo. The day of Rizzo’s swearing in, Joe McGinniss, then a columnist at the Inquirer, described […]
Posted in Uncategorized 4 Comments
12th and Pine: Where “The Cisco Kid” Became “The Big Man”
By transferring Captain Frank Rizzo, a/k/a “The Cisco Kid,” from the station house at 39th and Lancaster to 12th and Pine in May 1952, Police Commissioner Thomas J. Gibbons hoped to solve two problems. He increased law enforcement in Center City and saved Rizzo from himself in racially charged West Philadelphia. On Pine Street, the […]
Posted in Uncategorized 2 Comments
Where Frank Rizzo Became “The Cisco Kid”
When reformers took over City Hall in 1952, Thomas J. Gibbons, the newly appointed police commissioner named Frank Rizzo to his first command. The 30-year-old Rizzo had recently passed the civil service exam for sergeant and was considered a good match for a tough section of West Philadelphia. Rizzo’s propensity for raids on numbers parlors, […]
Posted in Uncategorized Leave a comment
Searching for John Sloan’s Philadelphia Saloon
Artist John Sloan considered the back room of McSorley’s a “sacristy.” So, it follows naturally that his five oil paintings of the venerable New York ale house are sacred icons of saloon culture. Between 1912 and 1948, Sloan didn’t merely depict life at McSorley’s, he conflated, celebrated and elevated populist ideals of art, community and […]
Posted in Uncategorized Leave a comment
August 1901: All Hell Breaks Loose on Locust Street
August 6, 1901. “With an appalling roar that made buildings quake a quarter of a mile away, an explosion demolished five houses on Locust street between Tenth and Eleventh, last night. The extent of the death and disaster spread by the catastrophe could not be estimated—probably twenty were killed, and the burned and maimed reach […]
Posted in Uncategorized 1 Comment
Centennial Chronology: The South Philadelphia Race Riots of July 1918
“Every American who takes part in the action of a mob or gives it any sort of countenance is no true son of this great democracy, but its betrayer” declared President Woodrow Wilson in his denunciation of lynching one hundred years ago this week. Wilson called on all Americans to “actively and watchfully . . . […]
Posted in Uncategorized Leave a comment
Saloons: Rise and Fall of the “Ladies’ Entrance”
“Sloughing against the bar with one foot on the rail would have been unthinkable behavior for most ‘decent’ women, let along spitting into the cuspidors or allowing their skirts to trail in the beer-soaked sawdust,” wrote Madelon Powers. “For some women even entering a bar is a fearful prospect,” agreed Mary Jane Lupton in Feminist […]
Posted in Uncategorized Leave a comment
The Urban Saloon: Refuge of Men and Power
“I didn’t know anything about girls,” Jack London wrote, “I had been too busy being a man.” For London, as well as millions of other American men of similar vintage, the saloon was ground zero for “being a man” where the “test of true manhood,” as Madelon Powers put it, “was peer recognition for being […]
Posted in Uncategorized Leave a comment
Men And Their Saloons
Growing up as a newsboy on the streets of San Francisco, Jack London got to know and love “the wide-open, all-male flavor of saloonlife.” “I had no time to read. I was busy getting exercise and learning how to fight, busy learning forwardness, and brass and bluff. I had an imagination and a curiosity about […]
Posted in Uncategorized 4 Comments
Bedfellows Not So Strange: Richard M. Nixon and Frank L. Rizzo